


Piledriver

by PallasPerilous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Castiel Loves Dean Winchester, Castiel Returns (Supernatural), Coda, Come back here I promise it's not insufferable, Dean Winchester Uses Actual Words, Grief/Mourning, Love Confessions, M/M, Not Very Many Though, POV Dean Winchester, POV Second Person, Post-Episode: s15e18 Despair, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27583381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PallasPerilous/pseuds/PallasPerilous
Summary: It’s just a drumbeat of syllables running in the back of your head. Might as well beshave and a haircut. (Which you could use, incidentally.)It eases off a little, after the universe ticks over. You’re so fucking relieved that you basically revert to a lower life form for awhile — you’re like a jellyfish, or a fungus, or a Yankees fan. For a few minutes there, things are pretty sweet.Then the clock starts running again, and you and Sam are faced with the frankly fucked-up necessity of needing a hot meal and somewhere to pee.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 79
Kudos: 395
Collections: The Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection





	Piledriver

You’re not really sure when you started doing it.

That’s a fucking lie.

You started doing it ten, maybe twenty minutes after.

Not as a conscious thing, not like those snappy comebacks you think of the next day, or like those speeches you practice in your head and then never get the chance to deliver. (Although it seems like other people have better luck in that regard.)

It’s more like a tic — like the way Sam used to pick at his hand, or your mom used to hum the same little bit of _Stairway to Heaven_ offkey. (Which was kind of a trip since she’d come back from, you know. There.)

You think: _I love you, too._

It’s just a drumbeat of syllables running in the back of your head. Might as well be _shave and a haircut. (_ Which you could use, incidentally.)

It eases off a little, after the universe ticks over. You’re so fucking relieved that you basically revert to a lower life form for awhile — you’re like a jellyfish, or a fungus, or a Yankees fan. For a few minutes there, things are pretty sweet. 

Then the clock starts running again, and you and Sam are faced with the frankly fucked-up necessity of needing a hot meal and somewhere to pee.

It kicks back in then — during the peeing, specifically, because _goddamn_ did the dude _never_ get over what a fucking nightmare it is to have a bladder. Like it actually made him mad. Even after he got his batteries back and was once more able to, like, _effervesce_ fluids out of his body or teleport them to the surface of Mars or whatever, he never stopped giving you pitying looks whenever you got up to use the can. On the road he’d ask if anybody needed a bathroom break at _every single freeway exit_. You chewed him out once that you in fact were not a four year-old or an Alzheimer’s patient and could therefore hold it for more than twenty minutes at a time, and he looked at you with such bottomless patience and empathy that you could’ve thrown him out of the fucking car. _I love you too._

Instead of a heartbeat, it’s like a piledriver hitting the ground ten feet away. 

_I love you too._ It rattles your fucking thighs as you wash your hands in the gas station bathroom. None of the other dudes do because dudes are fucking disgusting. This attitude was maybe part of the problem.

 _I love you too._ You come out and the car’s moved and you have a hot second of freakout, then you see Sam’s just pulled it away from the pump and parked in the lot and honest to God (go team!) you almost burst into tears. What the fuck.

_I love you, too._

That night you do your absolute best to lobotomize yourself ( _not_ to obliterate yourself, which is a sign of progress and for which effort you absolutely deserve a round of applause from…somebody), but the piledriver just keeps on pounding away and you realize that it’s either piledrive or get pile _driven_. Sam’s asleep six feet away after his own inpatient procedure but you’re really fucking starting to panic so you say it out loud, anyway.

_I love you, too._

And something gives, eases off like a gas bubble turning a corner in your gut, and you pass out.

So you lean into it. You make it your thing. You figure you can either be losing your mind, or practicing, so you choose practicing. You’re showing the powers that be that you’re keeping the faith. You’re holding a torch.You’re being the change you want to see in the world. You’ve talked to coma patients before and you’ve prayed to this asshole before and this isn’t any different. Isn’t it?

Washing the dishes: _I love you, too._

Checking the oil: _I love you, too._

Swinging a machete and hitting that sweet spot between vertebrae where the head just pops right off, like a Lego dude: _I love you, too._

Pulling on socks: _I love you, too._

Burning that fucking jacket: _I love you, too._

Not out loud, or at least, not where anybody can hear you. That would be weird.

And you know, _you know_ , that he doesn’t hear you, either. You know that, worst of all, he didn’t even _need_ to hear it. You’ve heard a lot of shit about _unconditional love_ , but it’s never had any goddamn appeal to you because, what? Somebody loves you the same no matter what fucked up shit you do, no matter how you feel about them?

That’s either (a) some seriously poisoned Kool-Aid or (b) so huge it’s useless, like giving somebody a galaxy for their birthday. You want unconditional love? Get a fucking dog.

_I love you, too._

Lately you’ve been swapping in phrases that have the same rhythm or meter or whatever, so you can say them out loud without worrying anybody more than usual. _The rain in Spain_ does some heavy lifting for a couple weeks, then _ba-DUMP-bump, tissshh!_ followed by _the king of beers_ for about half a particularly shitty afternoon and then closing out with _you bet your ass,_ which is a much better fit for your lifestyle.

So fine, great. Life goes on. You were the subject of his unconditional cosmic love-boner _whatever_ and getting that off his chest was all he needed to go happily fucking off into the abyss. And you’re still down here (up here? over here?), drinking coffee and hating Mondays. Awesome. _I love you, too._

This is around when you discover the best match for both meter and tone yet, one so close that it doesn’t even feel like a placebo for the real phrase. It’s a whole different drug, actually. It makes you feel like a million bucks, it’s absolute rocket fuel. If the original is whiskey, this shit is meth. You turn a whole nest of ghouls into one big ghoul smoothie and then at the bar later somebody nervously informs you that you were yelling it out loud the whole damn time.

The phrase is: _go fuck yourself._

You imagine it at night, lying in the empty bed, your pulse hammering in time: him standing there, one big cow-eyed khaki rumple, and you yell: _Go fuck yourself._ _You asshole. You bastard. You smug piece of shit. Go fuck yourself. How many times have we done this, and every fucking time you find a way to make it worse._ _Go fuck yourself._

_I love you, too._

After a few weeks it loses its edge. You kinda knew it would, having some experience with the limits of amphetamines and your own rage-juice glands. It downgrades from a battle-cry to a slur. At some point you realize you’re not even saying it to him anymore. You’re saying it to you. _Go fuck yourself._

You try to imagine him saying it instead. _Go fuck yourself_ , in that nutso Sam the Eagle voice that he must’ve gotten out of a box of Cracker Jacks, because it sure didn’t come complimentary with Jimmy Novak’s dry-ass mouth. _Go fuck yourself, Dean._

Somehow it’s still the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to you.

So you go back to the OG version, and this time it feels like it settles in. You do whatever the psychological equivalent is of buying it a dog bed and a food dish and a leash, and you take it out for walkies whenever it starts to chew on the furniture. _I love you, too._

You get so used to its presence that sometimes you even forget it’s there. You’re joking around with Sam, eating sandwiches at some picnic grounds on the way to Sioux Falls for a social visit, and you say some dumb thing to him, who knows about what. Sam rolls his eyes and shakes his head in disgust as required by the kid brother certification board and snorts “I love you, man,” in the way that means _how are you even allowed to exist,_ and you answer “I love you, too,” in the way that means _I love you, too._

Sam has seen a lot of wild shit, but the look on his face after that is a brand new one to you.

“Checkmate, asshole,” you say, in case he’s worried you’re gonna off yourself in the bathroom or something.

You do get to say it, eventually.

Like most things in life, it happens after you’ve totally given up, and then totally given up giving up, and have achieved the spiritual equivalent of that shrug emoji Claire sends you sometimes. When the phrase is well past thinking about, when the words don’t even carry any meaning anymore; they’re like the thought version of blinking, or swallowing. A background process, until something flies into your eyeball or you try to breathe a tortilla chip.

So the tortilla chip shows up one day. Don’t worry too much about the details here, just take it for granted that it either required a heroic effort of years that nearly broke you, or that he just showed up unsolicited on the porch like a copy of _The Watchtower._ Or maybe you’re both dead; seriously, who cares, because regardless — he’s there, and you’re there, and for awhile other people are there too, but eventually they go away.

And it’s him, and it’s you. And if you hadn’t absolutely digested this thing in advance, if you hadn’t broken each word down into its atomic particles and cut and pasted them into your DNA so that 45th century forensic anthropologists from Mars could extract it from a fragment of the mummified marrow of your left ass-bone, you might’ve said something else.

You say: “I love you, too.”

You realize, as you say it, that you have reached the limits of your preparations. You’re a samurai with a single move; you’re the cannon in the 1812 Overture; your photo’s in the dictionary under _one-trick pony_ and you’ve got frosted tips and you’re blinking _._

So you say it again, and then a third time, and a lot of times after that. You keep saying it, for years, in varying degrees of franticness and horniness and happiness and honestly still-fucking-angriness and whatever else is on special that week. You say it to his face and to his dick and to his back and to the mere concept of him well after he’s left the room, left the state, left the dimension. Eventually you stop bothering to say anything _else_ to each other. There are maybe half a million words in your native language, according to Sam, who uses them all, and with everybody else you keep on using the two hundred or so you feel confident about.

But with Castiel, you make do with just the four.

_I love you._

_I love you, too._


End file.
